About John
John's clinic appointment in Omaha went great! He was 27 pounds 7 ounces and has grown a little taller too, putting him right at 34 inches, finally for real this time. His labs all looked good and they cut his TPN from 14 hours to 12. He cried when we told him that he had to go to the hospital, but then when we pulled up at Charity's, our friends outside Omaha, he did the happy dance and was all excited. Getting to stay with friends actually made the trip more like a mini-vacation than a clinic visit and that we got to see the Sipes, wow their kids are growing, and meet with some other Looper families was a bonus that made up for John having to go into clinic where he cried because they made him go in a room. I've not yet told him that he is headed back there again on Monday, I think we'll tell him when it's time to go. Besides, he'll love knowing that we are headed back to the Baker B&B. You can see a picture of John with the Baker gang here!
At home John has been doing great. As you can see he loves the new computer desk...
...little stinker, so far he's not done anything to the computer that I've not been able to undo, but we'll see how long that lasts. He has gotten sneakier, and now when he hears us coming into the room, or sees that my attention is no longer being held by what I'm doing at the sink he pops around the end of the bar and gives me this look...
...yep, he has innocent down pat!
John's other news is that we had him reevaluated for speech therapy. Amy, John's therapist is wonderful, she is much more in tune to the needs of the child, instead of just foisting the philosophy of the school upon them. We knew that we could trust her with our most important question - Does John need to continue with speech therapy, or would he be better off going fully into sign and stopping speech altogether? If you know nothing of the issues of being deaf there are two basic camps, the deaf is a blessing camp who is offended by any hearing aid/implant to use the child's residual hearing or any attempt at oral communication. The other camp is the oral camp and they are pro hearing aid/implants and almost exclusively strongly anti-sign. Because Mark and I are both hearing parents the oral camp sure seemed like where we would like to live, after all John being able to talk as opposed to sign would just make things much more normal, but alas we have come to realize over the past year that this wasn't going to work. Now Amy did some testing for us on Monday, John is so smart, he has had no official intervention, ie therapy, in months and he has not only not gone backwards he's still progressing forwards in his language development. On the tests there are things that he should have been able to do at 2 that he still doesn't quite get and stuff that he's not supposed to be able to do until he's 5 that he breezes right through. That is one of the things that makes determining what is best in a school model very hard for him because he rarely fits in any of the normal models - but then I don't think many kids do, but that's another topic. Anyway, the answer to the question is, stop speech entirely and dive into sign with both feet to give John the best language education that he can get. Will he ever talk verbally, no one knows of course, but for now sign is the way of life. Mark and I have talked about this day coming, thought of it and such, but finally the day is here and there are no other roads, so we are traveling down the middle somewhere between the two camps of the deaf world. John will be taught sign, mom and dad will be learning it, and yet he will still have his hearing aids and we will still verbally talk to him too. Why shut a door that doesn't have to be closed?
Well never mind the titles I'll get to the other crazy stuff that's been going through my head in another blog update, John is waking up, the pizza must be put in the oven and the two of us dressed for church. Tonight is the first Advent midweek service and I'm excited that we are getting to go.
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